Annual herring run up the Taunton River is a rite of spring

Beginning about a month ago and continuing through the first couple of weeks of May, the annual herring run — when the fish return to their natal rivers to spawn — is surging through the region.

Alice C. Elwell

The surface of the Nemasket River starts to look surreal in the spring to the 15-year-old eyes of David Andrews.

“It looks as if the water gets sharp, and is growing its own fins,” said Andrews of the annual herring run, in which millions of fish swim upstream on a 23-mile journey up the Taunton River from Narragansett Bay to the Nemasket River and finally the Assawompset Pond Complex. At its peak, the number of herring averages 1,000 to 2,000 per hour.

David is a third-generation Middleboro native who was inducted into the spring ritual by his father, Lincoln D. Andrews. For the Andrews family, witnessing the annual migration is a rite of spring that was started by David’s grandmother, Jean Gammon.

Gammon, 75, remembers chasing the herring behind the former Star Mill — now called Winthrop Atkins — as a youngster. As a child, she’d wade in the river, looking for herring that needed a boost up the ladder and catch them with her bare hands.

“I’d run up river so they didn’t have to jump over the falls.” She said, “I thought I was rescuing them.”

Beginning about a month ago and continuing through the first couple of weeks of May, the annual herring run — when the fish return to their natal rivers to spawn — is surging through the region.

“You’re not a Middleboro kid until you fall in the Nemasket catching a herring by hand,” said David J. Cavanaugh, chairman of the Herring Fisheries Commission.

Cavanaugh is monitoring this year’s run closely , the first of returning adults that have been protected by a three-year ban.

After a peak year of 1.9 million fish counted in the Taunton River in 2002, herring across the Eastern Seaboard began a dramatic decline to a low of 400,000 in 2005. A statewide ban went into effect that year and was renewed this year to protect the once bountiful fish. Last year, 800,000 of the fish were counted.

Cavanaugh said it has yet to be determined what caused the decline, but he suspects offshore fishing.

According to the Herring Alliance, populations of river herring — which refers to two species, both alewife and blueback herring — along the Atlantic coast have declined by more than 95 percent.

Once herring lay eggs in the Assawompset Pond Complex, they turn around and head back to the sea, said Cavanaugh. The eggs hatch into fry, and by late summer, they’ve grown to two to four inches long and are ready for their journey to the sea. But instinct guides them back year after year to spawn, Cavanaugh said.

Cavanaugh said natural predators flock to the banks of the Nemasket, including blue heron, sea gulls, mink, fox, raccoon, eagles, osprey and cormorants. The gulls and cormorants follow the herring up the river from the ocean.

“That’s what tells you the herring are on the way — the sea gulls are gathering,” he said.